Software vendors are very interested in gaining insight into user purchasing behavior. Knowledge of user habits and retail preferences can be used to tailor product offerings and promotions, and thereby increase sales and profits. However, software vendors often receive only limited retail purchase information for their products. Typically, such software vendors only have access to reporting information that retail partners are willing or able to provide, or can only estimate a rough number of units sold based on retailer replenishment requests.
Such retail purchase information often spans long sampling intervals, for instance on the order of a week or longer, and hence may not provide a level of detail desired by the software vendor. Moreover, the number of units sold may span a large geographic area served by a single retailer distribution center, thereby preventing the software vendor from observing specific regional trends. While some retailers track sales information and trends in finer detail, they often consider such tracking information to be a valuable commodity and charge software vendors for access to such data.
Hence, what is needed is a method that facilitates making transaction and reporting information available to software vendors without the above-described problems.